IT'S not at all what its name suggests, for Cliffe is an expanse of dykes, marshes and mudflats. It's like nothing up here in the North Country, but perhaps all the more fascinating to we largely hill-bred Northerners because of it.

Charles Dickens evokes it wonderfully in the opening pages of Great Expectations, whose narrator, Pip, recalls: "Ours was the marsh country down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea." About to be seized in a marshland churchyard by the convict Magwitch - one of the most famous opening scenes in literature - the young Pip had just felt the first intimation of what he calls "the identity of things... that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scatterred cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; that the low, leaden line beyond was the river, and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea."

Miraculously Pip's marshes, though only 30 miles from London on the North Kent coast, remain much the same as Dickens described them. But that isn't their only claim to distinction. Scarcely a square yard doesn't enjoy some particular wildlife status - sites of special scientific interest, and national and even international nature reserves. The RSPB alone manages seven reserves, sanctuaries for wetland birds, insects, and many small mammals including the endangered water vole.

But probably not for much longer. For the Cliffe marshes are a front runner in Government proposals for a new airport in the South-East. With four runways, it would be twice the size of today's Heathrow. Obliterating 30 square miles of the marshes it would also swallow up 1,000 homes and a village church.

Of course, the broad policy of expanding airports or building new ones to match the predicted growth in air travel needs to be challenged. Why should aviation fuel escape tax, especially since aircraft are major polluters - the chief cause of global warming? Rail travel should become the main means of inter-city journeys within Britain and northern Europe. And if levying an appropriate fuel duty on air travel curbs business trips and dampens the package holiday industry, so be it.

Meanwhile, support for a locally-launched fight against the Cliffe proposals has already come from many parts of Britain and abroad. This column is pleased to be able to add a North-East voice to the swelling opposition to what would be Britain's biggest single act of vandalism for the last 50 years. As a small country, we can no longer afford to concrete over any given 30 square miles - still less a wilderness supporting much wildlife, and the least changed landscape associated with our greatest novelist. New Labour lacks shame.

FOOT-and-mouth. Two days after I expressed worries about the lifting of restrictions on livestock movements, pressed for mainly by sheep farmers, the Government decided they should stay. Not on my advice but that of its chief vet, backed by its chief scientific officer, and with support from farming's national pig and cattle associations. What say my critics now?